URSABLOG: Where Am I?

I was arranging a meeting and asked for the address. It was in a part of Athens that you don’t normally associate with shipping, but by a quick check on Google Maps, and looking at a few known landmarks, I was able to know where I was going. I drive around Athens on a Vespa, so I don’t have the luxury of Google Maps in transit anyway. And if truth be told I rather pride myself on my sense of direction.

But my sense of direction – gained in part from a lifelong love of maps and a fascination with place and space – is nothing compared with other species of the land, sea and air. In the 1860s, sailors captured a sea turtle near Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. They branded it and intended to bring it back with them to Europe, but on reaching the English Channel the turtle looked unhealthy, so they tossed it overboard. Two years later, the same sea turtle was caught again near Ascension Island. Apart from being extremely unlucky to have been caught again, it had navigated its way back from a place it had never been, never even swam to, and swam back effortlessly – apparently without getting lost – straight back to where it belonged. A special case? Not according to Brian Klaas, to whom I am once indebted to for inspiration.

Many species travel the globe with an ease that many of us would envy. Arctic terns commute back and forth between the Arctic and the Antarctic, travelling between 25,000 and 50,000 miles per year. Monarch butterflies migrate across generations, the great-great grandchildren arriving at a destination thousands of miles away that their long dead ancestors had set out for. Eels and salmon travel thousands of miles across the sea to reach the breeding grounds where they were hatched, not just any old place. Even the humble pigeon can find their way home from at least a hundred kilometres away.

They are able to do that by using “magnetic maps” to navigate, and these are not only passed on, but inherited. But this is not universal: we, and other animals do not posses the skill to read magnetic maps, but rely on a process known as path integration, where we intuit relative location based a constantly updated sense of speed, direction and distance although memory – or maps – will also help us enormously. Path integration is the reason why we have a rough idea of which way to go – maybe using landmarks or even the position of the sun in the sky. Where we are is being constantly, automatically updated in our heads.

It always amazed me that when I travelled by car with my nieces and nephews when they were very young, they always used to wake up a few moments before the car arrived at their house. It was as if they knew that they in the area. I thought that this was due to a familiar speed, movement or sound of the car, but maybe there are other things going on. Our brains have two distinct kinds of navigational neurons: place cells and grid cells. Place cells fire when we are at a specific location, and will fire nowhere else. There is, after all, no place like home. Grid cells however fire at regular intervals as we navigate the world, producing a hexagonal pattern that allows us to understand where we are, with multiple layers of granularity. How this works remains a mystery, but work it does.

Navigating at sea however is something else. Once out of sight of land we can quickly get lost, with only the sun and stars (if we can see them) to guide us. We need latitude and longitude to place us in the world.

Latitude is easy, whether on land or at sea, calculated by using the position of the sun at noon, or by using the North Star at night (in the northern hemisphere). Longitude is more difficult because it has to be calculated knowing what time of the day it is where you are. But if you don’t know the time, you don’t know where you are. Back before watches were reliable, knowing how far east or west you had travelled, especially by sea, with winds and currents impeding or speeding your progress  was, to say the least, difficult. To know where you are you need to know:

– What time it is in the place you left (such as London)

– What time it is where you are now (in the open ocean, for example)

If you have that, and have the sun (for knowing when it is midday), and the sun or the stars for latitude, then you know exactly where you are. It was only relatively recently, the 18^th century in fact, that the longitude problem was resolved. For a very readable account of this achievement, and the work of John Harrison, see Longitude  by Dava Sobel.

Basically, he created, with astounding skill, craftsmanship, determination and invention five timepieces, the first working marine chronometers, with several innovations that changed not just marine history, but world history. His timepieces employed several new anti-friction devices, facilitated by, among other innovations, using a naturally oily wood that reduced the need for liquid lubrication. He also invented the caged roller bearing, a nearly frictionless mechanism that later helped unleash the industrial revolution by improving machinery. Caged roller bearings are still used in virtually every complex machine made today. Ask any chief engineer.

To solve the problem of pendulums that elongate or shrink in varied climates, he invented a bimetallic mechanism of cancelling these expansions and contractions out. By combining brass and steel, he could effectively ensure that any bit of the mechanism that elongated would be offset as “the downward expansion of the steel rods is counteracted by the upward expansion of the brass rods.” Harrison’s related invention of the bimetallic strip is still used today and has been instrumental in thermometers, gas safety valves in ovens, electric circuit breakers, and cars, to name a few. That the industrial revolution started in Britain, and that the British Empire was for centuries the dominant seagoing power distributing the fruits of their technology around the globe – together with less benign gifts – is surely no coincidence.

Navigation at sea remained the same until the early 20th century, when wireless telegraph and radio signals transmitted time signals across vast distances to shipboard receivers. And then of course GPS – using satellites – eclipsed methods that relied on earthbound timekeeping, and brought us Google Maps.

Knowing where we are in the world is vitally important in understanding who and what we are. In his book Into the Silent Land, Paul Broks describes submitting a patient to a Wada test, by putting the two different halves of the brain to sleep one after the other. The left-brain version of the patient was different from the right:

Ms Left-brain was talkative and cheerful. Ms Right-brain was unsettled, mute, morose. When the words finally broker through, she hadn’t a clue where she was. ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ I’ve never hear Ms Left-brain swear. Afterwards, when the drug wore off, Ms Left-brain spoke for the person. ‘It was a breeze,’ she said. There was no recollection of Ms Right-brain’s discomfort. It had been edited out of the story.

Knowing how to calculate where were are is, I suspect, an important part of knowing who we are, and being comfortable with it. As we happily tap our destination into Google Maps, we give ourselves up to the instructions without acknowledging our surroundings or our place in them. Leaving aside long pseudoscientific theories of how social media and the rest of technology, not to mention machine learning and AI (which are, I am reliably informed, different things), imagine a future conflict where the satellites were disable (i.e. shot out of the sky). Would our seafarers know how to navigate? Would we know where we were? But by delegating much of our daily lives to machines and systems that we don’t understand – even in simple terms – do we lose our sense of ourselves, and our place in the world in it? Ask any parent who has had to deal with the distress of bullying on social media with their children, even when the child has caused the distress, and you will perhaps understand. And how many times do we nod sympathetically when a friend tells us that they are lost?

In business life too, in the rush to embrace new technology, are we forgetting to take a measure of where we are, and how we have got there? In the rush for success, and results, do we forget about what we know and, more troubling, our understanding of how things work, so we can arrive at a place where even if we do get there, we have no idea what we will find? I am not saying that we should stay where we are, and in fact our desire to get better is part of what drives our desire for new technology, and newer, better things. It is about being human. But we should know where we are, otherwise we will be, like so many seafarers before John Harrison made his wonderful five maritime timepieces, at risk of shipwreck, and all at sea.

Simon Ward